CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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This week the European Commission (EC) announced that it is fining Google $2.7 billion for anti-competitive tactics in the company’s iconic search product. In this post I’ll unpack what’s going…
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Killing car privacy by federal mandate
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is proposing a requirement that every car should broadcast a cleartext message specifying its exact position, speed, and heading ten times per…
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Lessons of 2016 for U.S. Election Security
The 2016 election was one of the most eventful in U.S. history. We will be debating its consequences for a long time. For those of us who pay attention to…
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Web Census Notebook: A new tool for studying web privacy
As part of the Web Transparency and Accountability Project, we’ve been visiting the web’s top 1 million sites every month using our open-source privacy measurement tool OpenWPM. This has led…
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Breaking, fixing, and extending zero-knowledge contingent payments
The problem of fair exchange arises often in business transactions — especially when those transactions are conducted anonymously over the internet. Alice would like to buy a widget from Bob,…
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What does it mean to ask for an “explainable” algorithm?
One of the standard critiques of using algorithms for decision-making about people, and especially for consequential decisions about access to housing, credit, education, and so on, is that the algorithms…
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Innovation in Network Measurement Can and Should Affect the Future of Internet Privacy
As most readers are likely aware, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a rule last fall governing how Internet service providers (ISPs) can gather and share data about consumers that…
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Multiple Intelligences, and Superintelligence
Superintelligent machines have long been a trope in science fiction. Recent advances in AI have made them a topic for nonfiction debate, and even planning. And that makes sense. Although the…
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The future of ad blocking
There’s an ongoing arms race between ad blockers and websites — more and more sites either try to sneak their ads through or force users to disable ad blockers. Most…
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Dissecting the (Likely) Forthcoming Repeal of the FCC’s Privacy Rulemaking
Last week, the House and Senate both passed a joint resolution that prevents the new privacy rules from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from taking effect; the rules were released…